The Battle Between CRM & Marketing Automation: Who Will Reign Supreme?

It’s fair to say some of us struggle to distinguish the differences in CRM and marketing automation platforms. So just for you we will give you a serious low down on how these technologies function, what they are used for as well as their pros...

Marketing automation platforms have an impressive demand generation capacity, that can develop prospect relationships on a personal one-to-one level. This is achieved by collecting detailed scoring, weighting and segmentation analysis, and applying it to conclusive results of marketing strategies and certain customer behaviour.

The current marketplace is customer/prospect oriented, meaning these types of platforms excel at providing a solution to the old-age question of how to move forward with mid-funnel prospects who are not ready to buy.

Marketing automation was designed to focus on engaging prospects at a time that is right for them, using their desired platform, based on their own needs. Marketing automation will hopefully provide the desired level of education and engagement which will in turn create efficient opportunities to sales.

On the flip side, CRM was created to help customer-facing employees reinforce and expand current customer relationships, by fully utilising all parts of a client’s data. All this information will be accessible to everyone working within the company, and the data will be stored in one place. Because of this, certain operations will be streamlined which will either decrease or eliminate minor or needless tasks, while supporting efficient decision-making conducted by individuals communicating with customers accounts in departments including marketing, customer service and sales.

Data infrastructure is the driving force behind CRM systems, which means they are able to significantly improve a business’ ability to control and analyse, by using metrics which were not available before.

Some of you might be wondering which tech to choose, should you go for CRM or a marketing automation platform? The answer is both, as companies who decide to use both platforms are sure to reap the most rewards!